Hugh Bailey: Reformers ignore public at their peril

Published 6:33 pm, Friday, May 24, 2013

Bridgeport's first go-round on school reform was undone in part because the idea of including the community was considered an inconvenience. The most recent version is headed down the same road.

Back almost two years now, city and state leaders stunned residents -- including some school board members -- by announcing an imminent vote to dissolve the city's Board of Education and ask the state to take it over. The plan was unveiled on the Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July weekend in 2011, at the last moment for an agenda item to be posted without breaking the law. At the next meeting, July 5, the board voted 6-3 to go out of business, and the state Board of Education stepped in.

Temporarily, anyway -- a flurry of lawsuits eventually led to the state Supreme Court overturning the decision. The local board had not followed all the steps state law requires before a takeover can be sought. Specifically, the board neglected a mandatory retraining exercise. Since there was no training, the court ruled the takeover illegitimate, and back came an elected board.

It's not as though fulfilling the training requirement would have been difficult. It likely would have been some sort of pro-forma activity just to check off the box on the takeover requirements list. But undergoing the training might have tipped people off about where all this was headed. Since the plan was to wait until the last moment to spring the takeover plan, all measures were taken to keep it secret. And it ended up costing the state-appointed board its own existence.

But not, however, before they first fired the superintendent and then brought in reform superstar Paul Vallas to run things. According to a complaint filed last week, now it's Vallas who is improperly excluding the public.

The district's 1,400-member teachers' union says Vallas is breaking the law by ignoring school governance councils, which were set up by state law to allow teachers, parents and the community to participate in making decisions at their schools.

Vallas' response, "I don't have time for this nonsense," ranks up with the time he compared himself to Michael Jordan a few months back. Coupled with a decision last week to have all the district's reading and math coaches reapply for their jobs -- which led one principal to tell administrators that if their "goal was to demoralize an entire district, you have accomplished that goal" -- it's an indication that if the Vallas reform program isn't falling apart, it's at least showing some cracks.

But on the school governance councils, it's not Vallas' opinion that matters. It's up to his school reforming partner, state Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor, who must decide within 10 days of receiving the complaint whether to investigate or dismiss it.

Pryor and Vallas, of course, go way back; Vallas is here only because Pryor brought him to Connecticut. They've worked together on international school reform projects. It's hard to imagine Pryor publicly reprimanding his best reformer friend.

Still, the optics of rejecting the complaint would be awful. The union does not file these complaints lightly. And in an underserved district like Bridgeport, any indication that parents and other community members are being ignored needs to be taken seriously.

School reform can't work without community buy-in. That's why closing schools, as many big-city districts are doing these days, is not only a bad idea but counterproductive. It sets an administration and the community, where a school might be the most stable part of a child's life, as adversaries, dooming reform efforts no matter how well-meaning they might be.

If an investigation backs up Vallas' stance that the district is in compliance and in fact is creating more ways for parents to be involved, all the better. But we're not there yet.